ABSTRACT
Extensive outbreaks of epidemic disease last century were a spur to sanitary reform in British cities. The failure of nineteenth-century city dwellers to successfully confront contagious diseases is sometimes accounted for by the defective or incomplete state of medical knowledge concerning their origin and transmission. Barrett’s explanation of reform relies heavily on the overthrow of misconceptions concerning the origin and transmission of disease, and so he claims that ‘the transition from the miasmatist to the contagionist approach in public health administration was a godsend for Collingwood’. The fear of epidemic disease, which had proved so potent a stimulant to reform in London, also influenced its colonial satellite. The Point Nepean quarantine station was proclaimed in 1852, and it was in the wake of news that cholera had reached Mauritius in 1854 that Victoria passed a health act on the British model, appointing a central board of health the following year.
